The essays that follow are drawn from invited presentations of the Conference Group on the Middle East, which meets annually in conjunction with the American Political Science Association. The essays published here were presented in San Francisco, August 29-September 1, 1996, on one of three panels dealing with gender, politics and the state. Thanks to the continuing generosity of the Ford Foundation, five scholars from the Middle East were able to participate. The contributors would like to thank Farhad Kazemi, Deborah Gerner and Jean Leca for their excellent comments at the panels. Louis J. Cantori, who has shepherded the Conference Group since its creation by a group of University of Chicago graduates more than a decade ago, deserves special thanks for his tireless commitment.
INTRODUCTION
Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University
Questions of gender and politics in the Middle East have been marginalized when not totally ignored by leading scholars of the region's politics. Although slowly being eroded, the dominant paradigm continues to conceptually divide society into two realms, the public and the private. The public realm is often presumed to be the domain of men, and it subsumes the practice of politics. The private realm is the domain of affective ties defined by blood and marriage where, presumably, women interact comfortably but with little political consequence for the state's relationship with society. This paradigm not only distorts our understanding of society and politics but also ignores the centrality of gender roles for those in power as well as those in the opposition.
Anyone who has visited the Middle East in recent years understands that the negotiation of public space by women is a central and divisive political question that evokes issues of power and subordination. For the Islamists, the veiled, protected woman may signify righteousness and honor, but she also corroborates a patriarchal template for society that assures male predominance.1 The tenability of this construction of gender roles is by no means assured. The Islamists' insistence upon strict gender differentiation in public is a matter of profound concern for others and has given rise to the mobilization of an impressive number of women and men to challenge the Islamists' definition of public morality, most strikingly in Algeria and in Turkey, but elsewhere in the Middle East as well. In addition, within the diverse Islamist {11ovements, the articulation of gender roles is a matter of more debate than is commonly appreciated in the West (e.g., compare the relatively "liberated" contemporary writings of Hasan Turabi or Fahrni Huwaidi to those of the late Sayyid Qutb.)
Whether in a provincial city such as Nabatiyya in southern Lebanon or a megacity such as Cairo, a kaleidoscope of women's clothing styles defies any attempt to generalize along class, sectarian or political lines. In the central streets of Nabatiyya one encounters a number of women wearing variants of stylized Islamist dress. Equally visible, however, are women dressed in a variety of styles including conservative, Western-style dresses, slacks and skirts, and even a few rather daring ones. The clothes that women wear are, on one level at least, an ideological statement. Public space is routinely contested: by the Islamists, who persuade some women to transit public space observing proprieties wrapped in the aura of immutable religious truth, and by secularists, who spurn the hijab or mandiil and other distinctive features of Islamist dress. (Islamist interlocutors decoded the Nabatiyya street scene as a representation of the social pluralism that provides the context for politics in Lebanon and precludes the achievement of ideological hegemony by Hizballah.)
Gender definition is also shaped by the policy of the state. The politicization of gender has usually been central to the legitimacy formul.as of ruling elites in the modern Middle East. The states that emerged in the twentieth century exploited gender - espousing feminism as a matter of state policy - in order to solidify their grip on power by eroding the authority of the traditional elites.2 Thus, in Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Iraq, for instance, energetic efforts were made to emancipate women through increased access to education and recruitment into the bureaucracy. As Nilufer Göle noted in a talk at the I 995 meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, in the new Turkish republic of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk the exemplary Turkish man was, in fact, a woman.3
State building in the Middle East often entailed the construction of statist economies, but as these economies have failed and the state's dominant economic role has receded, state feminism has often declined correspondingly. Economic restructuring and liberalization and the authoritarian state's penchant for eviscerating formal associational life have sometimes lent heightened salience to patriarchal structures in society (e.g., Egypt, Iran and Jordan). In other cases, state feminism persists, as in Algeria and Tunisia, as an intentional challenge to the Islamist opposition. In both countries, gender has served to polarize society, grossly complicating the restoration of civil peace.
Despite the authoritarian state's obsession with controlling associational life, the economic retrenchment of the state and occasional experiments in political reform (i.e., liberalization) have created space for the emergence of a number of independent private voluntary and benevolent associations, as well as some rights-oriented groups. It has often been noted that this void has been aggressively tilled by the Islamists pursuing an instrumental formula for building support. However, this is contested political space, and the activities of non-Islamist groups, including an impressive number of women's organizations, are very much a part of the picture. Notable examples include Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen. It is noteworthy that the electoral successes of Refah in Turkey have engendered a veritable flood of groups espousing laicism and women's rights.
Much of the recent writing about civil society has focused on formal organizations, such as professional syndicates, clubs and private voluntary associations that reflect the interests of the middle class. Less attention has been devoted to the informal types of association, including urban-centered networks based on reciprocity and trust rather than the contractual ties that characterize formal associations. It is this sphere of civil society that especially confounds the public-private paradigm, reaching at it does from family and neighborhood into the locales of government while often crossing lines of class, status and gender. The essays that follow explore these and other important themes. As a set, they illustrate that gender questions are central to-any understanding of politics in the Middle East.
WOMEN, NETWORKS AND THE STATE
Diane Singerman, American University
In a conference on gender and society in the Middle East at the University of Michigan several years ago, a discussion arose about the limited political participation of women in Third World nations. Nesha Haniff suggested that when Western feminists and social scientists highlight the repression and subjugation of women in the Third World, they should not forget that most men in Third World nations are also excluded from conventional spheres of political life.4 While it certainly matters that Egyptian women have the right to vote and Saudi women do not, Saudi men do not elect their leaders either, and neither Egyptian men nor women have many real choices when voting. It is extremely important to understand the ways in which women are dominated that differ from the ways in which men are dominated. At the same time, we should remember that elites restrict the boundaries of political life for both men and women to serve their own ends. Within the Middle East, and Egypt in particular, the state and its elite constrain political participation and possibilities for overt resistance. The political space left to women and men is shaped by these structural political realities.
Despite legal, bureaucratic, cultural and economic constraints, local forms of resistance and the politics of everyday life persist. These remain critical to an understanding of any society. Borrowing a metaphor from research on the informal economy, I have argued elsewhere that informal political activities constitute an arena of collective life that allows women and men to further their goals and objectives.5 Informal political activities are conceptually similar to informal economic activities, operating outside the recognition, regulation or enumeration of the state.6 Under authoritarian rule in many developing nations, including Egypt, the state has consistently regulated, licensed and supervised politics, just as much as it has tried to regulate and supervise the economy. Nevertheless, some "marginal" economic groups depend upon the informal economy and others even prosper within it. Similarly, constituencies excluded or marginalized from the formal political system depend upon informal political activities to articulate and further their interests, despite the efforts of the political elite or cultural norms to limit political participation.
Women remain one of the marginal political constituencies in Egyptian political life, despite their right to vote, their representation in parliament and the bureaucracy and their presence in professional life (particularly as civil servants). Yet they use informal means to achieve their ends. The goals of women may not be to transform their political system or promote a particular abstract ideology, but they are deeply engaged in improving their material life and their status. For example, women among the popular sector or shaab in Egypt build networks which redistribute public goods and services, define and regulate public order and morality, and support illiterate and lower-income women as they confront the Egyptian bureaucracy in their daily lives.
Highlighting informal politics as an arena of political organizing, public discourse and associational life need not glorify or exaggerate the influence of informality, but it does permit political scientists to understand how shifts in public agendas, political preferences and infrapolitics emerge gradually before women (and men) feel safe to make public, overt, visible demands on the regime. In other words, a descriptive analysis of informal politics that recognizes the strategies and collective life of women should not be confused with a prescriptive formula that suggests informal politics is the answer to political representation in contemporary Egypt. Normatively speaking, women (and men) should be able to do more than use informal means to pursue their objectives, but in the current political climate greater formal political participation that allows for true autonomy remains unlikely as Egyptian associational and political life remains tightly controlled and the prognosis for democratization bleak.
For women, the ability to participate in formal political life and civil society has been problematic for a complex set of reasons. Parpart and Staudt argue:
Gender is at the heart of state origins, access to the state, and state resource allocation. States are shaped by gender struggle; they carry distinctive gender ideologies through time which guide resource-allocation decisions in ways that mold material realities....[S]tates foster the mobilization of certain groups and issues. This mobilization usually benefits men rather than women.7
Gender was at the center of nationalism and independence movements during the colonial era, though gender issues were often secondary to other interests that were defined as more important by nationalist leaders. In the era of post-colonial state building, women were tapped to both produce and reproduce for the new society.8 In Iran, Paidar demonstrates the ways in which Reza Shah built the state through a particular articulation of nationalism, linking the "progress" of women to his own nation-building agenda. The new nation-state was conceived on the basis of a particular definition of modernity and progress that included the imitation of certain aspects of Western societies and the exclusion of others. The main features of this model were a central state, a unified nation, a single language and religion, the secularization of society and national sovereignty, technological progress, economic development and the emancipation of women. Among the items excluded were democracy and individual rights.9
Paidar and others have also begun to unravel the unintentional consequences of the largely instrumental alliances in several Middle Eastern countries between nation building regimes and women (and their male supporters) who fought to enhance their political power and social status. In secular Turkey, the new woman, unveiled, educated and employed, represented Turkish "progress" and development.10 Göle argues the quintessential modern man in Turkey was a woman.11 She has now become a lightning rod for Islamist opposition towards secularism. If Kemalist secularism defined unveiling as the symbol of modem Turkey, contemporary opponents of secularism promote reveiling as the symbol of the preferable Islamic moral order.12In Iran, the Islamic clergy were marginalized by the shah's state building nationalist project. Their "officially legitimate field of influence was reduced to the spiritual, personal and familial affairs of the citizen."13 As in many other polities in the region, survival for the clergy meant maintaining control of the hand it was dealt, and its most powerful domain was family law. Thus, in Iran and elsewhere throughout the Middle East, any change in the ulama's central role in mediating and regulating Islamic law was perceived as a political affront.
The grounding of family law in Islamic law, when most other areas of law were derived from Western codes, had the effect of situating the family within the ideological sphere of Islam as opposed to secular nationalism. All future attempts by secular states to reform family law along secular lines attracted strong protests from the clergy, who fought to retain their legal control over the family and women.14 In Muslim society, this alliance of interests thus meant that women had to confront a formidable constituency (the ulama and religious institutions) if they were to alter aspects of the legal order they believed were responsible for discrimination.
In Egypt, the nationalist movement during the colonial era and the populist and authoritarian policies of the Free Officers Revolution did not lead to an autonomous public and political society. It was either repressed or intentionally incorporated into state institutions. Cynthia Nelson15 and Margot Badran16 have described the emasculation of the women's movement in Egypt in the 1950s. Even though the new regime finally "gave" women the right to vote in 1956, their vote was voluntary and they had to apply to vote, whereas male suffrage was automatic and obligatory.17 The regime also provided functional representation for women in political associations and promoted the education and employment of women. Hatem refers to this era before political liberalization as Arab state feminism.18 Yet it was feminism on the same terms as state socialism or state nationalism - play by our rules in our legal, formal institutions and engage in public discourse in our (heavily censored) media or risk arrest, loss of employment, jail, torture and exile.
Within this context, informal networks have historically provided an institutional channel for political life in Egypt at both the elite and popular levels. The barriers placed on formal, legal politics in Egypt constrained, but did not snuff out, political and civil society. Many of these barriers remain despite the facade of political liberalization that Presidents Sadat and Mubarak created and the proliferation of non-governmental organizations in Egypt, including government-sponsored NGOs.19 For example, consider the way in which elite women, operating both within and outside women's organizations, were able in 1979 to revise Personal Status laws (at the center of debates on the "woman question" since the nineteenth century) through the personal intervention of Jihan Sadat, the legislative maneuvers of her husband, and pressure from women's organizations. In 1985, various women's and feminist organizations fought a dilution of the reforms after the High Constitutional Court declared the 1979 reforms unconstitutional. Facing constraints typical of associational life in Egypt (an inability to demonstrate, difficulty in finding a space to meet legally, and lack of formal permission to register their coalition - the Committee for the Defense of Women and the Family), elite women used vertical and horizontal informal networks to pressure the government and legal system to retain some of the provisions of the 1979 law. They were only marginally successful, and the new law was watered down significantly.20 Women in parliament were clearly constrained by their membership in the National Democratic party and hardly fought their party on this issue, and women outside parliament suffered from their inability to form a new, legal, licensed coalition to demonstrate and to publicize their positions.21
As Coleman22 and Putnam have argued, people utilize personal contacts, trust and social capital to pursue their ends in societies characterized by formal barriers to information flows and constraints on associational life and political participation.23 Yet, in the Middle East (and elsewhere) political scientists have typically condemned personalism and patron/client relations (highlighting the hierarchy rather than the reciprocity of networks) as anachronistic vestiges of traditional societies that will wither away as modernization proceeds in a linear fashion, as if kinship and clan can only limit democratization and economic development.24 The family, however, remains centrally located at the nexus of political power and wealth in the Middle East. One cannot but note that the leadership of many Middle Eastern nations is still based on family lineages (Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Oman, Somalia, etc.), and kin-based politics plays a predominant role even within secular or nationalist regimes as in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Libya.25 Acknowledging the political role that kinship continues to play in Middle East politics is not an endorsement of monarchy or patriarchy but suggests that scholars should focus more on the importance of family networks and associations at both elite and popular levels in order to understand constellations of power and possibilities for change.
Informal networks connect the supposedly private world of the household to the public realm. The physical presence of women in cafes, in workplaces, the marketplace, or parliament is not the only indication of the ability of women to influence public life and decision-making through their elaborate informal networks. The boundaries of the public and private arenas are porous and constant. Networks offer political opportunities for women and other excluded groups even though some might argue that the persistence of informal political channels only sustains the political status quo.26 But survival, collective life and resistance demand strategies that do not further endanger women and their families. It is within the context of political exclusion that informal networks (both at the elite and popular levels) enable women and men to organize their interests while hovering dangerously in a gray legal space. In horizontal and vertical networks, women can pursue aims that would otherwise be dangerous within the confines of open, public discourse and visible collective action.
Mary E. Morris, Los Angeles World Affairs Council
Family, Society and Religion
While many Middle Eastern women are emerging from segregated societies, many others are embracing fundamentalist precepts that would ostensibly return them to their previous roles. Some women continue to bow to traditional interpretations of Islam, but others are remolding Islamic traditions, finding Islam a vehicle for rebellion against existing political authority. Thus, while women such as the Jordanian Toujan al-Faysal or the Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi are perceived (at least by the West) to be at the cutting edge of change in the Middle East, so, too, are their sisters who teach in Islamic fundamentalist schools in Egypt or Gaza. In Oman, two women have been admitted to the majlis al-shura. In Iran, while the strict dress code remains in force, reforms that empower women have also taken effect, as in the regime's commitment to raising the educational level of women and the resulting increase in women university students, the existence of mandated work benefits such as paid maternity leave and nursing time, and reformist family laws. In fact, women's political participation has been encouraged since the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic, with women serving in the parliament and rising to high rank as deputy ministers.
Women, in fact, hold more high-level elected power positions in the Middle East than in the West, viz. Turkey's Foreign Minister (and former prime minister) Tansu Çiller, Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Bangladesh's Begum Khalida Zia. Algerian, Lebanese and Palestinian women defied every stereotype of the passive and compliant Arab woman as they fought back against colonial occupation, the ravages of war and the bitterness of life in refugee camps.
In Syria, almost half of the professional work force is female. In Saudi Arabia, women own businesses, run banks and participate in the educational system, but in female-only establishments. They are gaining the knowledge and professional expertise that may eventually allow them to participate as full partners in both business and policy decisions. Nonetheless, throughout the Middle East, marriage continues to be thought of as a contract between families rather than individuals. Men continue to be given preference over women, socially, economically and politically. Achieving justice and equality for women requires wide legal and procedural reforms in personal-status codes, employment regulations, citizenship, criminal law and social security. Additionally, many Arab women cannot take advantage of the rights they do have, because of ignorance of the law, economic impotence, the slowness of judicial procedures, the domination of tradition, and the disincentive of punishment.
The seclusion and segregation of women and the prevailing standards of morality that stress values and norms associated with traditional ideas of femininity, motherhood, wifehood and sexuality continue to marginalize women in political, social and economic organizations. For example, personal status laws in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt - more liberal countries, generally, in terms of women's rights - mandate restrictions on women's travel and forbid women to work without their husbands' consent. They further provide that a man has the right to an immediate divorce and reclamation of the dowry should he find that his bride is not a virgin.
Global Similarities and Differences
Western experiences may not provide the correct framework or the most appropriate model for women's struggles in the Middle East. Priorities of Western women - day care, abortion rights, higher pay, better jobs and economic equality with men - are of less significance to women struggling for elementary rights to education, to work of any kind, to equal wages, and to an end to sexual discrimination. Middle Eastern women have come to an awareness of feminist issues in agrarian societies that are only recently experiencing modem urbanization. They are raised in societies where religion continues to be an important regulator of everyday life and a source of identity.
For those women caught up in nationalist movements such as the Palestinians, the struggle is inherently political; there is no perceived contradiction between politics and women's issues. Gaining rights for these women is part of major structural changes in the nature of these societies. The attainment of rights for women must proceed in unison with the pursuit of human rights in general, and with the quest for more open, participatory governments. Because of the linkage among women's status, the dominant religious mores and societal norms, a change in the perception of women presents a threat to male status and privilege that a male-dominated society will not easily accept.
The Role of Culture and Religion
Women's status tends to reflect the cultures of particular countries as well as the extent of Western influence. Distinguishing among countries on the basis of secularism vs. traditionalism is overly simplistic, however. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are both essentially traditional societies, yet Kuwaiti women have a much greater degree of freedom than their Saudi sisters, and in the theocracy of Iran women are increasingly active in political life. Indeed, it appears that a religious interpretation of local culture can either encourage the emancipation of women or discourage it. There is, in fact, little agreement on what Islam's central texts instruct on gender issues. The Sharia does provide specific rules for gender relations, such as awarding child-custody rights to the father and his family. At the same time, Sharia gives full legal standing to women and guarantees them property rights. In practice, however, the exercise of property rights by Middle Eastern women has been limited by male domination.
Marriage practices and women's roles also vary according to social and political environments. Indeed, as Judith Tucker has pointed out, the single model of the patriarchal family in the Middle East is misleading, since it does not take account of the class structure that offered a range of urban occupations to lower-class women and took them out of their homes and into the cities and towns as peddlers, midwives, entertainers and domestic servants. Women of the upper class, while confined to their homes for the most part, have owned property, controlled substantial sums of money and managed businesses. Wealthy families have sought to retain property and economic influence within the family circle and to forge strategic political alliances through arranged marriages. Upper-class families have also traditionally been more concerned with family honor as vested in female behavior; hence the practice of confinement of women. This was not an option for the poor, where women were very much a part of public work life.
Personal-status codes continue to discriminate against women, especially regarding marriage, divorce and inheritance. Social, economic and political organizations marginalize women, and tribal customs such as the "crime of honor" - the taking of a woman's life if she is believed to have besmirched the family - continue to be accepted and are the basis of restrictive values and customs. As in Greek, Spanish, Sicilian and Latin American cultures, the "honor" of Middle Eastern men is based on the sexual behavior of women. Fathers continue to pick husbands for their daughters; husbands continue to order their wives not to work and to dictate how many children they should bear. Beatings by male relatives are tolerated; there are few shelters for abused women; and police rarely interfere to stop family violence. Western political and societal values, as well as the growing industrialization of the Middle East, have strained traditional mores. Increasingly, the strength and relevance of the patriarchal family has been eroded, allowing diversification of women's roles by reducing domestic responsibilities (e.g., a decrease in the average number of children) and by facilitating activities outside the home. The erosion of tradition has also led to uncertainty and anxiety, fear of losing cultural identity, and a resurgence of basic fundamentalist principles.
Empowering Women
Enhancing women's political influence in the Middle East needs to occur as part of the general economic development of the region. Other, specific, actions that can be taken to give women what they want, and are entitled to, include expanding access to education and training; increasing the number of women in decision-making capacities; providing government guarantees of women's rights to equal access to control of land, property and credit; improving health programs; increasing women's participation in the formal labor force; providing financial services to women, and altering the design and implementation of lending programs. Improving the status of women and achieving justice requires legal and procedural reforms in several areas including personal status, employment, citizenship, the penal system and social security. Full political, economic and social justice remains only a glimmer on the horizon for most of the women of the Middle East.
ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION, WOMEN AND POLITICS
Valentine M. Moghadam, Illinois State University
Research I have conducted since 1990 in and on Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Jordan indicates that there is an increase in the supply of job seeking women, along with exceedingly high unemployment rates among women, mainly new entrants to the labor market. Another trend is towards the "feminization" of government employment as wages are eroded and men gravitate towards the more lucrative and expanding private sector. Household consumption data in Turkey reveal an increasingly high female contribution to working-class budgets. In Morocco and Tunisia the rates of female industrial employment are high by international standards, and women's entry into service occupations is accelerating.
In urban areas, gender relations are predicated upon the male-breadwinner/ female-homemaker roles, in which men have direct access to wage employment or control over the means of production and women are largely dependent upon male family members. During the oil-boom era, characterized by urbanization and intraregional flows of capital and labor, the patriarchal gender contract was financed by the high wages of the oil economy. It is also codified in law, especially in family statutes that require women to obtain the permission of fathers or husbands for becoming employed, seeking a loan, starting up a business or undertaking travel. They also give women a lesser share in inheritance of family wealth.
In Modernizing Women,27 I argued that increased educational attainment and employment of women as well as the growth of a women's movement were leading to a questioning of the patriarchal order. Indeed, Islamist movements, it seemed to me, were to some extent reactions to the increasing visibility of women and the growing cracks in the structure of gender relations. In the same vein, I now suggest that structural adjustment policies and the imperatives of the global economy (e.g., competitiveness) may accelerate women's economic participation. Increased employment, along with the activities of women's NGOs, could force a change in women's economic and legal status, leading to more egalitarian gender relations.
Women's NGOs and Regional Restructuring
In recent years, MENA (Middle East/North Africa) has seen the rise of many NGOs and PVOs (private voluntary organizations) dealing with development issues, social services, human rights and women's concerns. Although NGOs dealing with women's rights or women-in-development (WID) issues are still relatively few and there is some question about their viability, they accord a role for women in the development process and represent changing state-society relations and definitions of citizenship. The expansion of NGOs in the region is partly a function of a global trend that gained momentum in the 1980s, when donor governments and multilateral funding agencies embraced NGOs as partners in development. But there are also internal or regional factors behind the rise of women's NGOs.
Demographic factors include the growth of an educated female population in urban areas and the entry of women into paid labor. Urbanization creates pressures for social services as well as opportunities for action. The age of first marriage for women is rising, while family size is decreasing for educated and employed women. Such demographic changes are giving these "modernizing women" more time for other public activities and allowing them to make demands on governments for equity.
Economic factors include the reduction of public spending in the areas of health, education and social welfare, and state failures in areas such as female illiteracy, reproductive health and legal reforms, which have spurred NGOs into action and focused women's attention on the links between development and status-of-women issues. Structural-adjustment policies usually call for the introduction of "user fees" in education and health care, and this, along with rising prices due to liberalization, necessitates public action. NGOs provide health, educational and social services and are ministering to the basic needs of local communities, thereby filling the gaps created by recent state economic policies.
As for political factors, in addition to channeling resources, NGOs are viewed as contributing to the formation of civil society, inasmuch as they convey the promises of development, human rights and participation. The proliferation of NGOs in MENA, especially those focused on issues of human rights and women's advancement, also reflects two parallel political developments: the rise of fundamentalism, and the growth of a democratization movement. Women's NGOs are especially significant because of the historical exclusion of women from public power and because of the challenges they represent to Islamist political movements and the cultural conservatism of the state.
International factors include opportunities afforded by the U.N. Decade for Women (1975-85) and the Nairobi Conference (1985); the spread of global feminism (exemplified in transnational feminist networks); the increasing recognition of the importance of a grassroots, participatory and bottom-up approach to development through NGOs; and the international conferences of the 1990s under the auspices of the United Nations: the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994), the International Conference on Human Rights, and especially the Women's Tribunal (Vienna, 1994), the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, March 1995), and the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995).
Women's NGOs fall into seven categories. (1) Service organizations, the oldest type, include charitable organizations, and have a largely "welfare" approach. (2) Professional associations seek equity for their members within the profession and the society; some also promote women-owned businesses and prepare women for jobs in the private sector. (3) Development-research centers and women's-studies institutes are usually national-based but increasingly conduct transnational research activities, especially in North Africa. (4) Human rights/women's-rights organizations are perhaps the ones with the most transformative potential and the ones most likely to experience state harassment. (5) Development and women-in-development NGOs provide technical assistance and expertise on issues related to sustainable development and implement projects on income generation and microenterprises for poverty alleviation, literacy and education, health, family planning, and community development. (6) There are women's organizations affiliated with political parties, whether left-wing, Islamist or other. (7) Worker-based and grass-roots women's organizations are concerned with the welfare of women workers (currently fewer in number than other types of women's NGOs, working women's organizations may expand as economic liberalization and further capitalist development draw more women into the work force).
In the past, women in MENA were concentrated in agriculture and a handful of professional jobs but underrepresented in all other occupations. The economic realities of the post-oil-boom era, as well as the aspirations and political activities of a stratum of urban middle-class women, are forcing a change. The decline of the male breadwinner, the emergence of the female worker, and the growing recognition that successful structural adjustment will require an enhanced role for women may alter their economic dependence on men. At the same time, the women's movement has been growing, with many NGOs being formed to address issues of women's rights and advancement.28 The transformation of the gender contract in the Middle East and North Africa from patriarchal to egalitarian by liberalizing economies and modernizing women may be a long-term outcome, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility.
GENDER, POLITICS AND THE STATE IN THE GULF REGION
Munira A. Fakhro, University of Bahrain
Gulf societies have undergone social and economic changes since oil was discovered in the region in 1930s and 1940s. The most drastic changes have taken place since 1975 with the sharp increase in oil revenues, which gave rulers direct access to moneys generated outside the local economy.29 These changes affected women most where they led to expanded education for both sexes, to an increased rate of participation by women in the labor force, and to new challenges to the Gulf's political systems. Women in Bahrain and Kuwait had anticipated that when independence came to their countries, they would enjoy the rights of citizenship. While the constitutions of Kuwait and Bahrain grant women formal equality in many areas, the ways in which gender roles continued to be defined have limited women's access to public life.
When the electoral laws were passed in 1962 in Kuwait and in 1973 in Bahrain, they restricted the right to vote and to be elected to office to males over 21 years of age. The reaction of the women of these countries went unnoticed. Few feminists in Kuwait demonstrated or tried to force their way to register at polling places, while in Bahrain some women's associations wrote lengthy letters to the emir and the speaker of the parliament. Their efforts did not produce change. Women realized that they would have to take the initiative and fight for their own political rights.
At present, women in the Gulf region are facing conservative governments and religious leaders calling for their confinement at home, their segregation in higher education, and their resignation from jobs. In Saudi Arabia, the mufti (the highest religious authority), Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, released a fatwa in June 1996, condemning working women and those mixing with men as a temptation that would lead to loose morals and adultery. He called upon working women to quit their jobs and stay at home. In Bahrain, in April 1995, the government was swift in reacting to a petition signed by more than 300 professional women calling for the restoration of democracy: it demanded a written apology or the loss of their jobs. In Kuwait, the Islamic bloc in parliament issued an amendment calling for the segregation of the sexes in higher education; it became a bill in July 1996.
Gender and the State
In most developing countries, the state plays an increasing role in the formation of the social policies, development strategies and legislation that shape opportunities for women: family law; provisions for working mothers; policies on education, health and population. The state is the gatekeeper for the integration of women into public life.30 Since working women in the Gulf region are employed in the public sector, this indicates less reliance on a male guardian as a provider and more on the state. In Kuwait, 93 percent of the Kuwaiti labor force (148,766 people), are employees of the state. Women comprise nearly 33 percent of the total. However, in higher administrative positions, women hold only 5 percent of all administrative positions. This percentage increases to 11 percent in middle management. Furthermore, Kuwaiti women still cannot hold ministerial positions because the election law bars women from both voting and holding public office.31
In Saudi Arabia, official state policy is designed not only to promote growth and development but also to preserve traditional family relations. Gender segregation in education and employment is meant to ensure that a woman's place is in the home. The number of Saudi working women is less than 5 percent, most of them in the health and education sectors. This policy has been deliberately formulated to shape a new political culture that acts as a screen, ensuring that technological and social progress remain within acceptable bounds.32 In 1960, the Saudi female educational system was placed under the auspices of the government, with supervision by the religious order. Educational facilities for girls have become available all over the country, providing general, technical, vocational and university-level education.
Nearly a million Saudi women are now enrolled at various levels and constitute about 45 percent of the national student population. By 1987, more than 80,000 Saudi women were employed in the government and the education and health sectors. To minimize the sensitive issue of male physicians and female patients, a large number of Saudi female physicians are being trained.33 This segregation gives women a professional advantage because there is no competition with men for such jobs. However, Saudi women are required by the state to wear a veil in public and are not permitted to leave the country without a male relative as guardian. In addition, women are not allowed to attend conferences or seminars.
As for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), traditional Islamic and tribal values predominate, but the spread of education has been significant in changing the role of women, lowering their illiteracy rate and increasing their educational opportunities. The state has also helped by forming a women's federation, headed by the wife of the UAE president, where women are trained in handicrafts and language skills.
Qatar has a more conservative and tribal society than the rest of the Gulf states. Driving is a privilege extended to only a few working women. Furthermore, women are not permitted to form women's societies. Only recently were they granted permission to establish a branch of the Red Crescent Society (similar to the Red Cross), the only women's society in Qatar.
Oman's socioeconomic development began last among the Gulf states, in 1970. Female employment then increased very rapidly, especially in the public sector. Furthermore, Omani women hold a great variety of jobs, even as pilots or officers in the police force, and some hold administrative positions as directors and undersecretaries. Despite such impressive development in education and employment, Omani women are still governed in every aspect of their lives by the Sharia.
Bahraini women became involved in politics during the 1953-56 uprising, when a few women participated in demonstrations alongside men. In the 1965 political disturbances, even more women were involved in organizing student demonstrations. Furthermore, women are playing a significant role in the uprising, which has been going on since December 1994. The marginalization of women's activities in Bahrain has created frustration among women; consequently, they joined the democratic movement by signing a petition presented to the emir. The first petition had 23,000 signatures, 20 percent of them from women. The petition called for administrative and political reforms, steps toward democracy, an end to corruption, and the limitation of foreign labor, which is causing high unemployment among the indigenous population. Another petition, sent to the emir in April 1995, was signed by more than 300 mainly professional women and members of women's associations. This led to the summoning by the authorities of 92 government employees among the signatories, from whom they demanded a written apology and the withdrawal of their signatures, on penalty of losing their jobs. The petition provides a number of significant indicators about changes in the lives of women of all economic strata, particularly the emerging middle and lower-income classes. These women were taking risks that identified their support for political issues.34 In her assessment of the women's role during the uprising, Saikaly compares those women who participated in the Bahraini uprising to Kuwaiti women during the Gulf War of 1991. During the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq and throughout the conflict, women were subjected to crisis conditions that afterward brought about some political confrontation. Saudi women, who also underwent a crisis during the Gulf War, attempted to obtain a margin of liberation by driving their cars.
Gender and Political Parties
Political parties are banned in all the Gulf states; however, there are underground movements, both secular and religious. In Bahrain, for example, the opposition movement can be classified into four groups: the Bahrain Islamic Freedom movement and the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain are two Shia religious movements that include a number of female members; the other two are the National Liberation Front and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. The latter two are secular movements formed in the late 1960s that few women have joined. Unofficially supported by the state is the Muslim Brotherhood party (Sunni); with its two charitable societies (al-Isiah, and al-Dawa al-Islamiyah), which have separate women's divisions. The few women who have managed to join either religious or secular political movements usually have had a family relationship with male party members. In general, these movements have made little effort to place issues important to women on their agendas, as the movements' leaders fear losing their less progressive members. Because women's participation is rising in most sectors of society, however, a greater involvement of women in political institutions should be expected in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman.
With the absence of political parties, organizations of civil society are playing an increasing role in the political life of the Arab countries. Professional associations and organized interest groups, nominally non-partisan, are becoming increasingly politicized. Professional unions and social movements encourage national fusion and assimilation. Citizens tend to define their relationship to the state not in terms of citizenship, but in terms of incorporation (tribal, sectarian or ethnic).35 This could be applied to the Gulf states, where labor unions and formal political parties are banned. Political discussions are taking place in religious centers and in cultural and sports clubs, as well as in professional and cultural societies and women's associations. Only indirectly, through the medium of non-political organizations and institutions, can change now be channeled. In the Gulf, the number of such organizations exceeds 80, with 32,000 active members of both sexes. There are eighteen such organizations in Bahrain, with 5,430 members: professional societies form 38.9 percent, charity 33.3 percent, and women's associations 27.8 percent. The latter, which consists of five associations, are formed either by groups of women from the upper classes or by groups of young working women, who play only a limited role in social change. In Kuwait the number of cooperative societies has reached 42, with more than 170,000 members, who control more than 80 percent of the retail food market. These institutions have begun to assume a large political importance. They formed the basis of the self-help network that arose during the Iraqi occupation in 1990, resisting the occupation and tending to the daily needs of the population by supplying food, medical care and basic services.36
At present, the role of such organizations is expanding in all the Gulf states. However, the governments are well aware that such pressure groups might form a threat to their authority, and they are therefore trying to minimize their power. In Bahrain, for example, the government issued legislation in 1990 limiting the role of all associations. The new legislation grants absolute power to Bahrain's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs to dissolve any association at will.
Women's associations in Kuwait are controlled and funded by the state, as they are in Bahrain; yet they have elected boards, written constitutions and paid membership. Kuwait's Law 24 of 1962 governing the activity of associations gives the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor full control over voluntary associations.37 Two major developments occurred after the Gulf War: first, the majority of women's organizations shifted their concerns toward serving the community; then, in 1994, a fifth organization, the Federation of Kuwaiti Women's Associations, was established as the sole representative for all the Kuwaiti Women's Associations. All but the Women's Cultural and Social Society joined the federation, which calls on women to press for implementation of the Sharia and to comply with Arab and Islamic traditions. 38 The WCSS and the Girls' Club support suffrage for women and since the early 1980s have campaigned for political rights, but they have made no effort to form a coalition. This lack of unity has undermined the women's political rights movement and has raised doubts about the commitment of women's groups to winning the vote for women.
WOMEN, ISLAMISM AND POLITICS IN TURKEY: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Ayse Saktanber, Middle East Technical University, Ankara
Until the 1990s, studying women in Turkey under the rubric of Islam was not common. The social status of women vis-a-vis Islam was considered a question of emancipation and liberation. Although the "emancipated but unliberated" status of women constituted a point of agreement,39 the emphasis shifted from the specific impact of Islam, as embedded in patriarchal conservative structures through which the liberation of women was restrained,40 to the functions peculiar to local characteristics of cultural control.41 Only after the second half of the 1980s was religion discovered as operative in the process of women's identity formation (cf. Acar 1995).42
One reason for not taking Islam as a starting point for the evaluation of women's status in society arises from doubts about Islam as a unitary ideology from which the construction of women's gender identities can be understood.43 The more important reason was that Islam in Turkish society was considered sufficiently controlled by the state as to not be influential in social life in general, and in socially determined personal orientations in particular. Thus, Turkish social scientists put an analytical distance between themselves and religion. Likewise, the Islamic movement in Turkey did not develop in a social context in which the appropriation of nationalism emerged as a challenge to European colonialism. There was no battle between the secular and the religious. Nor was Islam the official religion of the state, as it was in almost all Muslim countries, nor was it a source of legislation in society. Religion was confined to the private sphere.
Yet Islam has remained one of the most important sources from which the cultural tissue of the society gained its patterns. This is evident in the endurance of patriarchal ethics and moral control as well as in the shaping of men's and women's gender identities in a social context where equality between men and women has been mainly provided by legal codes regulating the public sphere. A similar sort of equality has not been fully maintained, either in legal or civil terms, in the private sphere. Here, the Islamic discourses of complementarity, sentiment and intimacy have dominated the everyday philosophy of the majority, and thus it has always been difficult to differentiate between secular and Islamic moralities.
The Turkish Civil Code of 1926 replaced the Sharia. It abolished polygamy; provided equal rights in divorce and inheritance, equality of parents in child custody, free choice of marriage partner; legitimized marriage by civil contract and set a minimum age for marriage. ln the same Civil Code, which remains almost unchanged today, there are discriminatory provisions that maintain inequality between men and women by accepting the husband as the head of the family, obliging a woman to take her husband's surname, giving the right to represent the family to the husband, allowing the husband to choose the family's place of residence and, in case of divorce, giving priority to the husband's decision over custody. Up to July 1992, by Article 159 of the Civil Code, the wife had to obtain the permission of the husband to be employed outside the home. In addition, Article 440 of the Penal Code defines adultery differently for men and women. The wife is charged with adultery if she engages in a relationship with a man other than her husband on one single occasion, whereas in the husband's case it has to be proved that he actually lived with another woman.
However, regarding the other legal and political rights that provide women with full citizenship, up to recent times it has been argued that, since the rights of women were granted by the state, there is no need for further struggle. Yet the new feminist movement in Turkey, which started in the 1980s, has not only developed faster than was anticipated; it has also had considerable achievement in setting the boundaries of gender politics.
In Turkey, one of the most outstanding achievements of the world women's movement, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was ratified by a decree of the Council of Ministers on July 14, 1985. Since some of the articles of the Convention were incompatible with some articles in Turkish law, the convention was ratified only by declaring reservations on such controversial clauses. In 1986 feminist groups in Istanbul and Ankara cooperatively organized a petition campaign in order to ask the government to comply with CEDAW. This feminist initiative was also the first democratic civil-society movement organized after the reestablishment in 1983 of the parliamentary system,44 which had been abolished by the 1980 military takeover. With the rise of women's political activism, the Directorate-General on the Status and Problems of Women was established as a piece of national machinery in 1990 and affiliated to the Prime Ministry in 1991 with the aim of ensuring gender equality in the Civil Code.
Although Turkish women have had the right to vote and run for office in the general elections since 1934, and finally managed to establish a state mechanism to promote the status of women in 1990, they could not be represented adequately in parliament, nor were they sufficiently aware of their political rights. This was even admitted in the official discourse of the state, as the traditional place of women in society was seen as incompatible with "women's attaining the position in politics that they rightly deserve."45
In Turkish society, whether Islamic or secular, women who are most highly esteemed are those who perform the functions demanded by the norms of family life.46 Similarly, in the realm of politics, their public identity is defined within familial or kinship role models. They participate in local party politics as yenge (brother's wife) or abla (elder sister) and they develop role models either as "motherwoman" or "asexual-puritan woman" even when they engage in politics on their own behalf.47 In left-wing political circles, especially in the period leading up to the 1980s, women were looked upon as bacy (sister, in rural expression) in an attempt to make them unsexed, depersonalized "woman comrades."48 Likewise, Tansu Çiller, the first woman prime minister of Turkey (1993-1995), would certainly like to present herself as the mother of the nation. It should be kept in mind that the ways in which the identities of newly emerging women Islamic activists have been shaped were not unlike the ways in which women's identities in general were shaped. Thus, Muslim women participants in Islamic activism in Turkey could successfully capture the various elements of secular discourse on women's rights and use them in their own local discourses on women's rights in Islam.
At the moment, it appears that the broader social structures proposed by Turkish activists for their Islamic society are not radically different from the ones maintained by the prevailing republican socioeconomic system. In fact, the Islamic movement's achievement is likely to rest on its success in efficiently using existing political, social and economic mechanisms in accomplishing the so-called Islamization of society. Here Islamization appears to mean a pragmatic project of civilization, the basic components of which are organized around setting the moral standards of society according to Islamic precepts. If Islam is the legitimizing force in social life, the result will be the means of exercising power over society. Moreover, if the overall motive behind the revitalization of Islam centers upon one major question - moral transformation - the role of women becomes very important, as the function of women in both secular and Islamic discourses has been primarily as mothers, the bearers of culture. In the context of Islamic revivalism, women are primarily responsible for the education of new generations ready to struggle for the progress of Islam. This responsibility to educate others is very similar to that vested in women both at the time of the Ottoman reforms and under the Republic. However, while Westernizing reformers expected women to educate the nation in the name of national progress, a Muslim woman was to educate others to establish God's system on earth and to enliven Islamic life.
On the other hand, insofar as the republican project of civilization was associated with the exigencies of nation-state building, any social movement opposed to the centralized state tended to be seen as the representative of democracy and civil society, often without regard to whether these movements respected cultural or moral pluralism. More important, in the context of those so-called civil-society movements, there often seems no room to question the moral premises of patriarchy, whether secular or religious. As a result, the emancipation of women has been given secondary importance to democratization and development.
This lack of emancipation is usually seen by young Islamic women activists merely as a consequence of the domination of non-democratic systems and can be effortlessly set right by the establishment of a "just Islamic order." They avoid acknowledging that women could obtain their legal and civil rights as an indispensable part of a secular regime, and they do not see that they actually benefit from a secular, egalitarian system. As they become well-educated and socially active, these Islamically inspired women tend to question the limits of male authority. This distinguishes them from many other Muslim women, who regard the questioning of men's authority in worldly affairs to be sinful and who are labeled by young Islamic activists as "closed-minded." They prefer to believe that what they are struggling for is to transform this world into Heaven while making an Islamic order real.
What Islamic activists do not acknowledge is that so-called Islamic equity between men and women, as opposed to social equality, will not put the world at their feet. A similar kind of social myopia afflicts the majority of Turkish society, which wants a pluralist democracy but fails to acknowledge that without legally protected social equality between men and women such a goal is unattainable.
PALESTINE: FROM NATIONAL LIBERATION TO FEMINISM
Lisa Taraki, Bir Zeit University (West Bank)
Colonial domination and the absence of national sovereignty in Palestine gave rise to forms of political organizing not unlike those found in many colonial and neo-colonial contexts. Most significant was the emergence, in the mid- to late-1970s, of mass-based parties and fronts and the related organizations of women, youth, workers and students. Among the most vibrant of these were the various activist women's organizations - called "committees" to distinguish them from the more traditional, charitable women's organizations - which played an important part in the mobilization of women against the Israeli occupation. Throughout the 1980s and particularly during the intifada, these organizations formed the backbone of the women's movement, drawing tens of thousands into political work.
During this period, the women's committees, by virtue of their affiliation with political parties and fronts, also monopolized the terms of discourse and activism, not only for their own membership, but for the women's movement as a whole. National liberation was defined as a priority, and organizing women into the national movement was the main form of activism. On the left, analysis of women's subordination was strongly influenced by two works produced by Palestinians in exile, Ghazi al-Khalili's Palestinian Women and the Revolution (1977) and Khadija Abu-Ali's Prolegomena on the Reality and Experience of Women in the Palestinian Revolution ( 1977). These works, widely read by women activists in the occupied territories, set the tone for much of the literature produced by the women's committees during this period. The standard formulation was that Palestinian women, like other Arab women, suffered under the yoke of oppressive traditions and practices, but that their suffering was compounded by the Israeli occupation. The integration of women first into the national struggle and then into the work force would enhance their condition as women.
There was no room in this discourse for a serious examination of the immediate sources of women's subordination in society or for projects to challenge gender hierarchies. Gender politics at this stage of the national movement did not include an agenda for struggling for equal rights. Formulations that deviated from the national consensus on gender issues were marginalized or condemned as diversionary. The women's committees were subordinated to their parent organizations in terms of funding, the scope of their activities, and the formation of alliances. However, this very link between political formations and their women's "fronts" also presented some contradictory aspects.
First, the decision by the national movement in the late 1970s to establish women's "front" organizations opened up new opportunities for women's participation in politics. Even though the establishment of the women's committees was based on the principle of isolating women rather than integrating them into politics, it did open up a legitimate space within which women could be active. Many ordinary women were thus given the opportunity to gain mobilizing and organizing experience that would otherwise have been impossible. Second, the women's organizations made it possible for many exceptional women to become national figures in their own right and to make a claim for more influence within party, front and PLO structures. Because only a handful of women were actually able to penetrate decision-making circles, frustration became generalized within the middle and higher ranks of the women's committees. This frustration is one of the challenges facing gender politics in Palestine today.
Several developments in the early 1990s had far-reaching consequences for the practice of politics in general: the waning of the intifada; the shift in focus from mass-based national liberation politics to diplomacy; and the consequent weakening of political parties and fronts, particularly those on the left. The installation of the Palestinian Authority in the self-rule areas was a further element in the new landscape, and one which is likely to influence the outcome of political life in the period to come.
On the level of gender politics, the new realities have produced paradoxical situations. On the negative side, women's mass organizations have been early casualties of the weakening of the major political formations (with the exception of Fatah, the ruling "party" in the quasi-state structure). Most of the women's organizations are in a state of disarray and have lost a good part of their membership. Many of their productive enterprises, day care centers and the like, have collapsed. No compensation in the form of increased visibility and influence in the parent political formations is being offered to the women who formed the backbone of these organizations. Furthermore, the new political culture is certain to marginalize women further, based as it is on old-boy networks of patronage and clientelism.
New Political Space for Feminist Politics
At the same time, however, women are beginning to create a new kind of political space that can only exist when there is a national authority, the domain of advocacy politics on gender issues. Many new, politically independent women's organizations have sprung up with the sole mandate of working on women's issues. It has been generally noted that as the uprising began to lose its momentum and mass character, a "new" feminist agenda began to be articulated by the women's movement. Factors adduced to explain it range from women's frustration at their marginalization to threats to women's autonomy and rights emanating from the Islamist movement and the unwillingness of the major parties to defend women's interests for fear of disrupting delicate political balances; to the breakdown of national liberation politics in general.
The "new" feminist activism is part of a larger development in Palestinian society: the transformation of many mass-based projects into "professional" institutions, as well as the establishment of politically independent NGOs. As with the new women's organizations, the emergence of "independent" organizations—or the "NGO-ization" and neutralization of politically affiliated groups—can be viewed as part of the backlash against the heavy-hand political parties wielded in the mass organizations affiliated with them.49
This new trend is also partly an outcome of the pressures, both subtle and overt, exercised by international donor agencies, the main financiers of these organizations. The issue of international aid determining policy, research and programmatic agendas is a separate subject.50 It may be sufficient to point out here that, particularly since the signing of the Oslo accords, international aid agencies have been an important influence upon Palestinian NGOs' projects and programs. A good example is the rush of training activity in "civic education" and "citizenship" during the period leading up to the Palestinian Council elections in January 1996. A plethora of training courses and seminars were held in far-flung comers of the West Bank and Gaza with funds offered to Palestinian NGOs, including women's organizations, from U.S. and European organizations. International development discourses on gender mainstreaming, gender planning and women's empowerment have also guided the numerous training courses and projects being designed today with the assistance - and perhaps upon the insistence - of international aid donors. The historic absence of a national authority with policy-making and legislative powers has precluded the development of a tradition of advocacy and lobbying in Palestine. Now that the Palestinian Council has been invested with some legislative authority and governmental departments are engaged in policy formulation in some areas, it is becoming possible to organize in order to influence public policies and lawmaking. Embryonic coalitions and lobbies have begun to make their presence felt, and women have been at the forefront of these activities.
A celebrated first case for the women's movement was the successful campaign waged in 1995-96 by the major women's advocacy body, the Women's Affairs Technical Group, to rescind a directive by the Interior Ministry requiring a male guardian's approval for the issuing of passports to both married and unmarried women. Other important examples are lobbying concerning the new Basic Law and preparations for a major campaign in the form of a mock parliament to influence legislation in family status, labor, criminal and other laws with gender significance. Another campaign launched recently aims at encouraging women to run in elections for local and municipal councils to be held sometime in 1997.
Whatever the success of the NGO movement within the new political system emerging in Palestine, it is clear that women's organizations will need more than planning, lobbying ;md negotiating skills to be effective in national politics. Ironically, they may discover that they will have to work through political parties again, in which case they will have to be prepared to wage a difficult struggle with the male leadership. Not only will old problems not go away, they will require women's integration into, rather than isolation from, the body politic.
GENDER, STATE AND CITIZENSHIP IN ALGERIA
Boutheina Cheriet, Visiting Scholar, Brookings Institution
The political class in Algeria is mainly represented by technocrats, a group that was instrumental in laying the institutional bases of state structures following independence in 1962. The attitudes of this group can be accurately called "neopatriarchy" (Hisham Sharabi's term). Their ambivalence toward modernity sowed the seeds of a gendered notion of citizenship rather than a universal one. Paradoxically, it is not in limiting women's access to the public realm that the hand of the neopatriarchal state falls most heavily, but rather in consigning women to "minority" status in the family. Thus, in order to be admitted to the space of public dealings, women in Algeria are asked to sacrifice their status as decision makers in the family. This is intended to ensure that their access to citizenship will not negatively affect the conjugal and familial structure.52
From as early as 1962, the spectrum of protagonists in the process of nation building in Algeria has included radicals, nationalist apparatchiks and technocrats, and religious conservatives. Despite a unitary facade, radical opinion seemed to dominate, reflected in such populist measures as agrarian self-management, free education and health care, and a widespread social-security system. However, the 1965 coup d’état lea by late Col. Houari Boumediene (1965-1978) put a sharp end to the revolutionary euphoria of the radicals, marking a first rupture with the "ideological" legitimacy of "specific socialism."
For over a decade, a popular consensus had supported a vast number of measures undertaken by the state technocracy in the name of economic efficiency and social egalitarianism. The most notable efforts targeted left-wing radicals (following a wave of repression in the middle and late 1960s), who were mobilized around agrarian reform and the trade-union movement, and women, who were integrated into areas such as education and health and given token participation in the labor market. Religious conservatives were compensated for their endorsement of socialist policies by the promulgation of Islam as the state religion and the establishment of colleges and institutes of religious education. Within this dynamic of rapid social change from a preindustrial to a post-colonial condition, universal enfranchisement was not a civil right but a commodity, a "barter good." Thus, for women, universal access to the public sphere has to be traded for empowerment in the domestic arena.
The Personal-Status Saga (1963-1972)
The process of the enactment of the Family Code shows all too clearly that any attempt to involve women in the management of family matters as full-fledged decision makers is perceived as endangering domestic stability and social cohesion. Whereas women's participation in areas of public activity has been internalized as a structural change, women's equal decision-making power in the family is perceived as not only sacrilegious but threatening to the traditional patriarchal order, whose best guarantor remains the family unit.
Debates on personal status were at first dominated by the revolutionary euphoria of independence, well illustrated by the adoption in July 1963 of a law setting a minimum age for marriage, meant to protect young girls. The bill was never applied, however, as conservatives in the legislative and executive bodies quickly denounced it as a secularist move. Subsequent attempts in 1966 and 1972 to issue provisions in favor of decision-maker status for women also aborted when confronted by lethal reactions from conservatives.
Most significant in this contest was the ambivalence of the elite in power. After the 1963 law unleashed the wrath of conservatives, administrative directives were immediately issued, invalidating the articles of the law that established civil registration of marriage contracts as the sole official requirement for the marriage bond. Recourse to civil legislation was denounced as opening the door to the secularization of personal-status matters.
The onslaught of conservatives on the various administrative and political institutions was relentless for the next two decades, until the enactment of the Family Code in 1984. Between 1963 and 1964, national commissions were set up to elaborate a personal-status law based on Islamic precepts. Such recommendations were issued not by the religious authorities but by ministers in charge of justice, who were either war veterans or technocrats. This scenario favoring a nonspecialized techno-religious "directive" over a "theological opinion" was to repeat itself again and again. It was a natural corollary of the monolithic authoritarianism prevailing in the political arena, whereby issues of public interest were addressed by technical and bureaucratic measures so as to avoid public debate. However, as controversy among traditionalists, reformists and modernists in the Assembly was leading to incessant - albeit closed - disputes, the government decided to put a halt to the personal-status-law project.53
Boumediene's 1965 coup d’état established a Revolutionary Council whose priorities were to reinforce the hold on society of the state apparatus, as well as to reorganize the economy along the lines of industrialization and the expansion of public services. Hence the abortive attempt to bring about yet another family law in 1966. The National Assembly had by then been dissolved, and the Revolutionary Council was even less keen on dealing with controversial matters such as gender roles and status.
This chapter was definitively closed, replaced by the speeches of Colonel Boumediene on the role of "citizens" in a modem developmental process. He issued a caveat on what constituted the ideal behavior of the Algerian woman-citizen: "...[E]mancipation (of the Algerian woman) cannot in any case lead to the imitation of the Western woman. We say 'no' to such developments, as our society is Islamic and socialist....We are all for emancipation, ...but this emancipation should not cause the decay of our society."54 This preemptory warning replaced for a while- because of the charisma of Boumediene's leadership all religious and legal discourses.
The 1970s were marked by yet another attempt to introduce family legislation along patrilineal and patriarchal lines, ignoring the changes that had occurred in Algerian family structure, as well as the more visible participation of women in the public arena. This time, strong opposition to the project was voiced by militants of the National Union of Women (UNFA), an affiliate of the FLN (National Liberation Front), the party then in power. Previous debates had never involved women, but the presence of women war veterans and other progressive professionals in the Union led to a change in the subordinated role of the organization. The leadership of the organization rejected the proposed text as dangerous, arguing that it treated women as minor subjects and ignored their rights as citizens equal to all others in the Socialist Republic. This bold move cost the UNFA leadership their positions; they were immediately replaced by less outspoken members. The Boumediene technocrats then embarked on a vast program to co-opt "agitators" into populist policies such as the agrarian revolution and the socialist management of enterprises, which was to last until Boumediene's death in December 1978.
The Saga Continues, 1982-1984
Following the power struggle to determine Boumediene's successor, the political scene seemed more open for restructuring. However, the same technomilitary elite remained in place, espousing only minor liberalization measures at the economic level. Berberists, Islamists and feminists were systematically repressed between 1980 and 1982. The Islamists objected to what they perceived as a growing secularization of Algerian society, while the feminists protested the lack of a clear enunciation of equal citizenship for women in the family legislation then in preparation. For the first time since independence in 1962, women organized street protests against the retrograde measures of the 1980-81 proposal to be presented to the Assembly. ·
The battle between ideal womanhood and ideal citizenship reached its climax with the legislature of 1982. The Assembly was to examine a personal-status bill delineating the contours of woman's status as wife and mother under the guardianship of husband and father. The bill introduced limits on a woman's participation in the public arena by conditioning her right to work on her husband's permission, a principle derived not from theology but from tradition. This seemed to gather consensus more easily than injunctions based on Sharia, which would have led to a debate along the more complex lines of the Islamic legal tradition. Neither the government technocrats who proposed the bill, nor the neopatriarchs of the Assembly were ready to open a public forum to debate the matter. Any recourse to theological expertise was discreet and limited to ad-hoc questions.
The legislative debate was confrontational. A few delegates with progressive views attempted to support the concept of citizenship and individual allegiance to the state, while staunch conservatives opposed the very idea of an equal legal status for men and women. In introducing the bill, the justice minister summarized its mission as embodying "...the legislative reference within the framework of Islamic principles, which ought to guarantee woman her rights, her position as partner of man and as mother in society." Following in the footsteps of the minister, the chairman of the Assembly's Administrative and Legislative Commission clarified women's status as minor in marriage, divorce and guardianship, based on the following tenets: (1) marriage is based on equality between husband and wife, except in legal responsibility, as familial authority (is) the natural prerogative of the husband; (2) divorce ("repudiation") is the exclusive faculty of the husband; and (3) guardianship (over women and children) is an injunction of Islamic legislation to insure the protection of incapacitated people.
Although ten delegates tried, in vain, to remind their peers of constitutional provisions on sex equality and the application of citizenship to both sexes, the Assembly turned into a veritable inquisition on the dangers to social stability of women's access to decision making in family matters. Some saw in the bill "a riposte against those impregnated with secular views," while others affirmed that the bill represented an opportunity for "rejecting secularism because it has made of woman a merchandise, by prohibiting polygamy and encouraging the separation of bodies as well as adultery." Fear of secularism signified fear of individuality and the concomitant sexual and social empowerment of women, implicit in the metaphor "the separation of bodies."
The 1982 bill was discreetly withdrawn in response to both the conservative onslaught and protest marches by independent professional women and a few war veterans, a first in the annals of civil disobedience in post-independence Algeria. The then-chairman of the Assembly issued a warning: "The Algerian Revolution is at the avant-garde of the Arab-Muslim nation. One of its most outstanding achievements is equality between man and woman in the acquisition of knowledge and access to work ...but...Algeria firmly opposes secularism." This was echoed ten years later on the eve of the first multiparty legislative elections following the landslide victory of the Islamists in the 1990 municipal elections. The parties headed by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) announced in their campaigns a doomsday for secularism in Algeria, with the promise of an Islamic Millennium.
Citizenship as a Barter Good
After the withdrawal of the 1982 Personal Status bill, conservatives kept pressing for family legislation in accordance with Sharia injunctions and traditional mores, especially those pertaining to the predominance of kin over the individual (female). This was achieved on June 9, 1984, when the Family Code was enacted. All provisions of the Code confine women to the status of dependents within a relational model of citizenship.
Of particular interest was the effort by conservative delegates to impose polygamy - far from a widespread practice in Algeria. Neither local customs nor the atomization of the family structure under the pressures of industrialization and urbanization were favorable to such unions. Polygamy was introduced as a Quranic injunction to constrain women's empowerment and enforce social control over them. It was supposed to ensure the survival of the extended family and the primary role of women as reproducers. In most of its provisions pertaining to marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance, the 1984 Family Code merely restated the Sharia injunctions. However, the government bill made polygamy conditional upon the consent of the first wife as well as the second. This provoked such an uproar in the Assembly that the debate became a virtual conference on polygamy. Government representatives managed to outmaneuver the intransigent conservatives and include this controversial article.
The post-revolutionary neopatriarchs in Algeria have appealed to religious views whenever radical secular opinion emerged and to rational "proof' whenever conservative opinion dominated. This maneuvering went unopposed as long as the processes of nation-building concerned only the public arena, where women became successfully integrated. But now women are expected to endorse citizenship as a favor rather than an inalienable right by accepting their exclusion from major decision making regarding personal status and the family.
Sheila Carapico, University of Richmond
Responding to legitimate feminist criticism of an earlier generation of male oriented, statist project portfolios, nowadays almost all nonprofit, bilateral and multilateral agencies mandate Women in Development (WID) projects and project components as part of a viable development strategy. In the current era of "privatization" and "democratization" of international assistance packages, WID projects frequently designate credits as "seed money" to private-sector enterprises and/or civic-sector voluntary organizations in order to enhance non-governmental investment activity.
International development assistance flows through myriad channels. Some international charities and non-profit organizations raise donations or rely mainly on endowments, but more of the larger development NGOs contract with bilateral foreign aid-agencies or with the United Nations to implement development projects on their behalf, and most official aid (overseas development assistance or ODA) projects are contracted to profit-making private firms. Western donors and U.N. agencies each have their own contracting systems. Thus most assistance flows from one or more public funding agencies to one or more private (corporate or voluntary) contractors. Even though policy statements and staff members champion "working with the grass roots" and "female empowerment," in actual practice, home offices, home governments, host governments and other officials always control project design, financing, implementation and evaluation.
In any case, all international organizations must work with an institutional counterpart in the host (recipient) country. Although historically the counterpart institution is typically a government ministry, in the seventies and eighties, donors began seeking as counterparts what they called community-based associations (CBAs) or private voluntary organizations (PVOs). More recently, as conditions of structural adjustment discourage further investments in public-sector ministries, the buzzword in international development circles is NGO (nongovernmental organization), a category that encompasses CBAs, PVOs, and other groups that may be national in scope and professional as opposed to voluntary. The majority of WID projects in the nineties are aimed at (1) strengthening Arab women's NGOs (AWNGOs) to provide economic and social services to women and/or serve as advocates of women's issues and interests, and (2) replicating successful models. Often the contracting agency for WID projects is a non-profit international NGO (INGO).
Political and Economic Competition
Most ODA is premised on the Keynesian economic concept of the "multiplier effect": projects stimulate jobs and wages, thus consumer demand, then retail sales and more jobs, in a growth cycle. In this elementary economic schema, new money creates demand for goods and services. Similarly, hard currency for non-governmental programs creates purchasing demand for NGOs. Demand for AWNGOs, which in a political sense comes from women's groups in donor countries, should, according to economic logic, stimulate supply. Dollars and Eurofunds are available to INGOs that can sign agreements with AWNGOs institutionally capable of serving as counterparts. Various donors and contractors actually compete for the patronage of the more successful Arab women's organizations, especially in the aid-intensive Egyptian environment but increasingly in other countries such as Eritrea, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen. Conscious of what some call the "limited absorption capacity" of existing AWNGOs to process all the available WID funds, European and North American WID officers and consultants are constantly trawling for un-or under-funded women's organizations that might be able to process funds for health, micro-credit, legal assistance or other services. Moreover, since funds are often defined as seed-money, dispersed in expectation that the activity will become self-financing, there is a self-generating market for NGOs not previously supported by international agencies.
By the same token, cash-strapped, foreign aid enters contest markets where governments and social groups compete for scarce donor dollars. In this environment, women, men, political parties and various institutions are highly motivated to organize in ways that make them eligible for hard-currency grants and loans or commodity assistance. Competition for leadership and control of qualifying NGOs becomes a high-stakes game. This situation is political on several levels. WID assistance is one strand of complex bilateral relationships between governments of donor and recipient nations. Within the receiving country, resources made available for WID further politicize relationships between regimes and national or local women's organizations. In addition, projects entice beneficiaries to vie aggressively for market shares, political roles and donor funds, while also linking success to a form of rent seeking behavior characterized by specific bureaucratic skills. By definition, foreign aid generally and WID assistance to nongovernmental initiatives in particular affect struggles over the allocation of scarce resources in a dependent polity. Of course the nature of this struggle ranges widely from one country to the next according to the weight of the donor community: Egypt, where every major international development donor, PVO or company has a well-established office and an on-going program, is at one end of the spectrum; war-tom pariah states, perhaps most notably Sudan, represent the other extreme; the "emerging nations" of Palestine and Eritrea are special cases, "blank slates" for architects of states and civil societies.
It is well known that overall dispersal of bilateral aid among Middle Eastern countries is very political. It has also changed in recent years due to the demise of formerly significant Warsaw Pact assistance, sharp declines in Arab assistance, changes in American strategic preferences, the emergence of the European Union as a major donor, and events inside Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Algeria and other countries. But politics does not stop there, for once an agency establishes a country program, the choice of projects, contractors and counterparts is also fraught with politics. From the perspective of national governments, WID may compete with other sectors.
Under extreme circumstances, international relief and assistance agencies regard WID-NGO projects as an alternative to projects assisting recalcitrant host governments while retaining a presence in the country. In the special case of Palestine, Western aid to West Bank and Gazan NGOs predated assistance to the Palestinian Authority. After Yemen's vote against Desert Storm in the Security Council in 1990, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) eliminated some $30 million in annual assistance to punish the government but selectively retained its two WID-related projects, one with the Women's Union and the other in mother-child health. Similarly, after the Taliban conquered Kabul in 1996, the U.N. and international voluntary agencies argued for continuation or enhancement of women's projects in tacit resistance to the unrecognized, misogynist, fundamentalist Afghan regime. In such instances, for better or for worse, assistance to women's groups becomes a sort of counter regime project.
Even where donors are supporting friendly governments with multisectoral development-assistance programs, say in Egypt or Jordan, WID projects tend to advance an explicit liberal political agenda, albeit one premised on some rather contradictory assumptions about Arab women. On the one hand, it is axiomatic that Arab women represent a latent, natural constituency for Western liberalism over either Arab Socialism or Islamist tendencies; that they long for legal, financial, political and gynecological liberation from their families; and that they are profit-maximizers who, if given an opportunity to raise ducks, will sell them on the market rather than serve them for holiday dinner. On the other hand, the stereotype of timid, oppressed, passive Arab Muslim women prevalent abroad assumes they do nothing for themselves. Home-office program designers scarcely dream that elite Egyptian women have been organizing charities and advocacy groups throughout this century; that informal on-the-ground circles offer means of political and economic mobilization for marginal groups; that there are plenty of assertive, successful, sophisticated women in the Middle East; or that avowedly Islamist groups such as Hizbollah in Lebanon sponsor health care, day care, revolving credit and skills-training centers run by and for women. Either way, whereas in the Cold War, World Bank and Western bilateral assistance projects were part of an explicitly anti-communist agenda, contemporary WID projects in the Muslim world become the poster children of the wider antifundamentalist campaign.
In keeping with the current emphasis on private-sector development, many WID programs aim to promote microenterprises and women's businesses. Usually the idea is to provide loans through an NGO that administers individual credits, along the Grameen Bank model wherein a group guarantee replaces collateral. In Upper Egypt, for instance, UNESCO, FAO, USAID (through CARE) and other donors have built women's centers offering training courses and start-up credits for homemaker activities like knitting, simple tailoring, fruit-drying, and household-scale rearing of ducks, rabbits, pigeons, chickens, goats or cows. In most programs, an NGO course taught by Egyptian women performing their year of obligatory national voluntary service qualifies graduates for loans to be repaid with proceeds from the activity in which they were trained. The market for such centers and their products was fully saturated. Thousands of village women, often brides-to-be, learned to make low-quality garments and jellies, the supply of which already exceeded demand. Under Egypt's structural adjustment program, loans for the purchase of sewing machines, chicken coops or other start-up materials are offered at "competitive market rates" that in 1992 ranged between 20 and 22 percent. True to the spirit of the free market, only the most aggressively entrepreneurial, talented and well-placed women launch profitable businesses after repaying a loan.
Competition is not only fostered in the private sector. Donor program managers are aware their programs offer valued perks: training courses, salary supplements, trips abroad for conferences, use of NGO offices, computers or vehicles. Indeed a lucrative, highly competitive field for Western-educated Egyptian, Jordanian and Tunisian female entrepreneurs is professional WID consultancy. WID "democratization" programs further entice women into the political arena as candidates, organizers, advocates or legal practitioners. Like credits for entrepreneurs, NGO or civil-society and democratization projects favor a competitive spirit combined with certain bureaucratic skills. The name of the game for the many liberal think-tanks, charities and women's groups in Cairo, where the lion's share of foreign aid is disbursed, is proposal writing in English. Whereas among the poor, alternative sources of credit may be cheaper or more conveniently accessible, for an educated, politically active entrepreneurial class of both women and men, NGO grants and loans are a lucrative business.
The development-practitioner discourse recognizes that some organizations are founded to get foreign funds and that some donors or contractors set up local organizations to do their business for them: these are called 00- NGOs (donor-organized NGOs). Examples are easy to find in countries like Egypt. The registered local NGOs responsible for the women's centers in Minya in northern Upper Egypt, for instance, were branches of INGOs such as CARE, Catholic Relief Services, CARITAS and Save the Children; or of the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services, Egypt's largest NGO, perennial beneficiary of Christian charities abroad and the first Egyptian NGO qualified to contract directly for USAID without an American intermediary.
People in the business also have names for oxymoronic government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs) and quasi-non-governmental organizations (quangos). Many have discovered, moreover, that revenue-hungry governments, wary of efforts to "privatize" aid through non-governmental organizations, seek to redirect foreign aid toward favored causes and cronies and to centralize control of assistance dollars. After the earthquake in 1992, for instance, Cairo banned any relief activities not coordinated through the national Red Crescent/Red Cross, a "quango" headed by Egypt's first lady. While beyond the WID sector the government was suing the national federation of Community Development Associations (CDAs) for control of foreign assistance, the Ministry of Social Affairs in Cairo ordered the transfer of WID funds from the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA), a group headed by a feminist writer, whose fame in the West helped secure hard currency support, to a Muslim women's group. WID consultants familiar with the many women's NGOs in Egypt know that some of them are the private domain of savvy Western-educated entrepreneurs, whereas others are created by bureaucrats in order to keep funds under ministerial control. In any case, in Egypt, as in most countries, to receive any hard currency an NGO must be formally registered and authorized, which means it must submit to government scrutiny and conditions.
Most countries have quasi-nongovernmental women's unions, and until recently they were the main or only formal, legal women's organizations, often created to dominate feminine political participation. In Yemen, foreign financing intensified competition for control of a highly politicized association with a very complicated local history, the site of competition among three political tendencies: the ruling party, the socialist party and the Islamists, each with plenty of female adherents. Ironically, an American project of Cold War vintage, subcontracted to the non-profit arm of a Boston consulting firm to work with two urban branches of the union, survived the Gulf War only to run afoul of competition among Yemeni women and their political affiliations. A steady stream of WID consultants from the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and elsewhere continue to look for projects with the Women's Union. In addition, many donors have also sought out and funded newer NGOs for WID projects, including several million dollars associated with the 1997 parliamentary elections and millions more to initiate micro-credit projects on the Grameen Bank model that will also include training centers as in Egypt.
Organizational models
Very complex technical standards govern registration of and disbursement of funds to NGOs. Formidable red tape complicates registration with the United Nations in order to receive funds or to attend the NGO forums of international conferences such as the Women's Conference in Beijing. Non-U.N. agencies are not much different. International bureaucratic standards resonate in the acronyms ubiquitous in the development consulting literature, as the reader will have noted, conveying a high degree of impersonal institutionalization. By definition, an NGO is presumed to have a board, by-laws, a treasurer and files. A bedrock condition for project approval is "sustainability,!' or the proposed activity's long-term cost-recovery prospects. In addition, auditors must impose pragmatic guidelines for management efficiency and strict bookkeeping. Training courses are often devoted to correcting NGO administration, but these are also criteria for funding. The Social Fund for Development (SDF), itself technically an Egyptian NGO (or perhaps DO-GO quango), was capitalized at over a billion dollars by a consortium of bilateral and multilateral donors to offset the potentially deleterious effects of Egypt's structural adjustment package on vulnerable groups. While recognizing there would be winners and losers, SDF hoped to make at least some poor women winners by offering soft loans to NGOs meeting certain criteria. They should represent poor, marginalized groups, including women; not be headed by Caireen entrepreneurs; and yet also have a track record, present a professional typed proposal with clearly tallied budget projections, submit quarterly spreadsheets etc.; and demonstrate through financial analysis a medium-term profit sufficient to repay the initial SFD loan with interest.
Not surprisingly, few proposals qualified. Although these criteria seem mundane, they are not without political ramifications. Proficiency in English or perhaps another Western European language is often a de facto requirement for leadership of a donor-assisted project, especially a well funded, long-term program. The overall bias towards those educated in the country sponsoring the project - in not only the language but the organizational models and even the computer programs of the home country - is considerable. Even among the educated classes this discriminates against millions who studied in Arabic, Russian or Czech. Graduates of Western universities may not be in close touch with the grass roots in their own societies and may be criticized as stooges or apologists for, foreign agencies (as indeed would an American group receiving foreign funding). They may represent a faction or perspective at odd with those of peers and or even of foreign sponsors, and in exchange for a stipend they may be required to host a continuing stream of foreign consultants who come to appraise and evaluate. These appraisers and evaluators are in all cases responsible to the home office(s), whose agendas govern the purse strings. Sometimes they put the point-person in a very awkward position, perhaps one in which she is outvoted by her own NGO. Home offices are notorious for holding to the letter of the initial design, even when, for instance, changes of government or natural disasters dramatically alter the circumstances of beneficiaries.
For the hardworking ordinary women most project designers say they hope to reach, the exigencies of registration and accounting impose a highly structured organizational model. This is bound to formalize, rationalize, register and engage activities heretofore characteristic of informal economies and popular community networks, to hook them into worldwide institutional and credit webs and standardize them. For working-class people in Cairo or Ankara, WID-NGO projects invite women to organize formally and commit resources on a voluntary, genderized basis: Other potential channels for civic energies, such as labor syndicates or Quranic societies, are simultaneously eschewed. Rural women are instructed by educated urbanites, urged to come to town, to borrow, to vote and, in some cases, to defy their families and shock their friends. Most participants, in the process of being needs-appraised, funds-qualified, or outcomes-evaluated will be asked to reveal details of their personal and family lives to local officials and strangers from abroad. This sort of invasion of privacy is offensive even to Americans already well accustomed to filling out tax forms, electoral surveys and insurance claims. It is far more risky in the many Middle Eastern societies, where security police keep tabs on clandestine associations, and for the self-employed, who would not otherwise declare their incomes.
These issues are not a matter of Western values meeting traditionalist resistance, scenarios of culture clashes writ large. Indeed it is not West that meets Islam but a subculture of youthful, Third World-conscious Western feminists who do not necessarily reflect the sentiments prevalent in their own societies. Their consciousness asserts a horizontal sisterhood or grass-roots to grass-roots collaboration in a shared interest-group agenda, sometimes overlooking the vertical relationship between center and periphery, between holders and seekers of purse strings. It sublimates how technical assistance ups the ante by creating new stakes in a financial-institutional contest on the ground. Social capital is generated in ways that politicize feminine participation in the civic sphere.
There is keen competition for the material resources Westerners make available on gender grounds. A similar competition exists in the many other arenas from health care to archaeological restoration, where local groups compete for international funds. Foreign funding raises many issues of organizational and informational models, poses problems of compensation and corruption, and generates questions of accountability to domestic or foreign constituencies. This does not mean, incidentally, that one would necessarily ban immunization or conservation projects. But these problems bear special meaning in an arena already highly politicized by ideological and cultural debates both within Arab society and between Islam and the West.
1 In Islam, marriage is a contractual relationship between families. The contract typically codifies the woman's disempowerment, and even where secular laws protect the wife's right to financial support and grant her the right to divorce, these rights arc seldom enforced by the courts. A recent initiative in Egypt aims to revise the marriage contract in order to equalize the rights of husband and wife. The initiative has not only sparked a lively debate in Egypt, but has attracted attention in several other countries of the Arab world.
2 Mervat Hatem, "Political Liberalization, Gender, and the State," Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, eds. Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995), 187-208.
3 N. Göle, "Secularism in Practice: The Emergence of Islamist Elites." A paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, December 1995, Washington, D.C.
4 Nesha Hanniff, "Western Feminism and Colonialism." A paper presented at the Conference on Gender and Society in the Middle East, University of Michigan, September 21, 1991.
5 Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
6 Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil. "Informal Sector Employment in Egypt." Series on Employment Opportunities and Equity in Egypt, no. I. (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1980), p. 15.
7 Jane L. Parpart and Kathleen A. Staudt, Women and the State in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990), p. 6.
8 Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women's Movements in Politics; Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
9 Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 81-82.
'° Nilüfer Golle, The Forbidden Modern (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Paidar, 84.
14 Ibid., 85.
15 Cynthia Nelson, Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 1996).
16 Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Marking of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
17 Howard-Merriam, 22.
18 Hatem, 187.
19 Dennis J. Sullivan, Private Voluntary Organizations in Egypt: Islamic Development, Private Initiative, and State Control (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994); Janine Astrid Clark, "Democratization and Social Islam: A Case Study of the Islamic Health Clinics in Cairo," in Political liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble, eds. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995).
20 Nancy Young Reynolds, Discourses of Social Change: An Analysis of the /985 Personal Status Law Debate in Egypt, Honors Thesis, Harvard University, 1989; Mervat Hatem, "The Enduring Alliance of Nationalism and Patriarchy in Muslim Personal Status Laws: The Case of Modem Egypt," Feminist Studies 12 (Spring), pp. 19-43.
21 As an example of the government's low tolerance for autonomous organizations. it dissolved the Arab Women's Solidary Association (AWSA) in June 1991 under Law No. 32 of 1964, the Law of Associations and Private Foundations, after AWSA publicly distanced itself from the Egyptian alliance with the United States and during the Iraqi-Kuwaiti war. ·The government also accused the organization of alleged violations of public morality when one of its publications "contained attacks against and aroused suspicions of the social and religious order, especially the conventions of marriage, divorce, and the (permitted) number of wives." Middle East Watch, Egypt: Court Upholds Closure of Women's Organization, 4 (June 1992), 2; "Update: Dissolution of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association," 3, (December 1991).
22 James S. Coleman, "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology 94,( 1988) pp. S95-S I 21.
23 Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
24 For a cogent structuralist critique of Putnam, see Sidney Tarrow, "Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work," American Political Science Review 90 (June 1996), p. 392:
25 Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, eds., Tribes and Stale Formation in the Middle East, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.)
26 Marcia Inhom, Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family life in Egypt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 12.
27 Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993).
28 Valentine M. Moghadam, Women, Work and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997).
29 Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 6.
30 Moghadam, 1993, p.18.
3l Modhi al-Hamud, Al-Maraa Al-Mudeera Wa Dhughut al-Amal (Female Manager and Work Stress), paper at a conference held in Kuwait by the Cultural and Social Society, May 6-9, 1996.
32 Moghadarn, 1993, p. 61.
33 Ibid., p. 62.
34 May Saikaly, "Women and Religion in Bahrain: An Emerging Identity," in Islam, Gender and Social Change, J. Esposito and Y. Haddad, eds., p. 2, forthcoming.
35 Khaldoun al-Naqceb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective, (London and New York: The Center for Arab Unity Studies, 1987), p. 127.
36 Crystal, p. 174.
37 Haya al-Mughni, Middle East Report 26, no 198 (January-March), p.34.
38 Ibid., p. 35.
39 Kandiyoti , "Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case," Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 317-37; 8. Toprak, "Emancipated but Unliberated Women in Turkey: The Impact of Islam," in Women, Family and Social Change in Turkey, F. Ozbay, ed. (Bangkok: UNESCO, 1990).
40 Ibid.
41 Kandiyoti, 1987.
42 F. Acar, "Women in the Ideology of Islamic Revivalism in Turkey," in Islam in Modern Turkey, R.L. Trapper, ed. (London: l.B. Taurus, 1991); Y. Arat, "Islamic Fundamentalism and Women in Turkey," Muslim World LXXX, no. I (January 1990), pp.17-23; Arat, "Feminism and Islam: Considerations on the Journal of Kadin ve Aile," in Women in Modern Turkish Society,. Tekeli, ed. (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, Ltd, 1995); Göle, Modern Mahrem (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1991); A. Ilyasoglu, Ortulu Kimlik (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1994); Toprak, "Women and Fundamentalism: The Case of Turkey," in Identity Politics and Woman, Cultural Reassertion and Feminism in International Perspective, V. Moghadam, ed. (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1994).
43 Kandiyoti, 1987; Y. Erturk," Convergence and Divergence in the Status of Muslim Women: The Case of Turkey and Saudi Arabia," International Sociology 6, no. 3 (September 1991).
44 S Tekeli, Women in Modern Turkish Society, (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, Ltd., 1995).
45 "Report Prepared in Accordance with Article 18 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women," T.R. Prime Ministry, Undersecretariat For Women's Affairs and Social Services, Directorate General on the Status and Problems of Women, no.SO, (1993), p. 67.
46 A. Saktanber, "Becoming the 'Other' as a Muslim in Turkey: Turkish Women vs. Islarnist Women," New Perspectives on Turkey 11 (Fall 1994), p. 127.
47 A. Gönes -Ayata, "Women's Participation in Politics in Turkey," Women in Modern Turkish Society, S.Tekeli, ed. (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, Ltd., 1995), pp. 244-45.
48 F. Berktay, "Has Anything Changed in the Outlook of the Turkish Left on Women," Women in Modern Turkish Society,S. Tekcli, ed. (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, Ltd., 1995), p. 252.
49 Rema Hammami, "NGOs: the Professionalism of Politics," Race and Class 37, no. 2:51-63, (1995).
50 See special foreign-assistance issue of Middle East Policy, Vol. IV, No. 4, October 1996, in particular, Sara Roy, "U.S. Economic Aid to the West Bank and Gaza Strip: The Politics of Peace"; and Roy's "Concluding Thoughts" in Vol. V, No. I, January 1997.
51 For a detailed account, see Boutheina Cheriet, "Feminism and Fundamentalism: Algeria's Rites of Passage to Democracy," in State and Society in Algeria, J.P. Entelis and P.C. Naylor, eds. (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 171-215.
52 Hisharn Sharabi, Neo-Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
53 Le Journal Officiel de la Republique Algerienne Democratique et Populaire, Loi no. 84-11 du 9 Juin 1984 portant Code de la Famille, no. 24, 12 Juin 1984 Imprimerie Officicllc, Alger; Le Journal Officiel de I'Assemblee Populaire Nationale (JOAPN), Debats Parlementaires, no. 126, 1982, nos. 46,47,48,52, 1984, Imprimeric Officielle, Alger. The latter represent the minutes of the 1982 and 1984 debates on the Family Code. All documents translated from French by the author.
54 Mameri Khelifa, "Citations du President Boumediene," SNED (Alger, 1975).
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